How to stay focussed by centralising your notifications

When you’re busy, you want to keep your focus and make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. When you’re getting emails here, LinkedIn InMails there, instant messages, phone calls, post-it notes and – god forbid – faxes from every direction, you are at risk of getting distracted from what you’re doing.
Whether you’re trying to find a handwritten note in a stack of paper or can’t remember if someone shared important information with you in an email or an instant message, it is time consuming to search through all your notifications and communication channels to find it.

Keeping all your notifications in one place will help you to keep your focus. Instead of alerts interrupting your train of thought, you can use your enterprise collaboration platform to manage your notifications for you. You’ll be able to search and find just the right piece of information exactly when you need it, rather than scouring through many message silos to find what you’re looking for read more.

Stuck at home due to the tube strike? HighQ Collaborate keeps you working

We’re headquartered in London, and today we’re in the midst of tube chaos as Transport for London staff hold a two-day strike. Londoners are struggling to get in to work, stuck on buses, queuing outside stations, or waiting in hour-long lines for taxis.
For those who have tried and failed to make it into work this morning, having regretfully given up after seeing the hopeless crowds attempting to make any kind of Central-ward motion (Boris bike stands empty, overground train platforms packed), working from home is the last option.
Even this causes disruptions to working folks’ day, as many businesses are not geared for home workers. For companies where all documents are hosted locally, email is the only way to communicate with the office and this relies on at least one poor soul to have made it in through the chaos to be able to email files to demanding colleagues.
Without the physical presence of the team, meetings must be cancelled, client catch ups must be postponed, and projects must be delayed. The tube strike isn’t just a mere irritation to thousands of commuters, but in fact causes thousands of pounds of losses in productivity for businesses across the capital read more.

Are paperless meetings possible? We think so.

Team meetings can take up a lot of time. Certainly at HighQ, we’re in and out of meeting rooms for much of the day, catching up on where we’re at with our global teams or brainstorming ideas for product updates or marketing strategies.

Usually, team meetings mean everyone traipsing into a meeting room with their own pad of paper and pen, each taking note of what actions they need to take or doodling their way through a particularly dull team meeting. The problem with this is that some people don’t bother to take notes, other people aren’t good at note taking, and the ones who are competent note-takers don’t tend to circulate the information among the team afterwards.

If there’s a document for discussion in the meeting, print-outs need to be made, and sometimes particularly diligent meeting-holders print out copies of their slide deck too read more.

Tuesday Tip: Mobile optimisation

Our Tuesday Tip blog posts give you some quick tips and tricks that help you make the most of HighQ Collaborate. Get more tips in our Tuesday Tip archive.

Mobile optimisation

HighQ Collaborate is designed to work on mobile devices as well as computers. It features a mobile responsive design that adjusts itself based on the device being used.

As the display size shrinks and changes (say switching from landscape to portrait view), the amount of information shown is altered, prioritising certain parts of a page over others by ‘hiding’ some information which can be accessed again easily.
Elements of the site are bigger to support the use of a finger instead of a mouse. And the Top Navigation Bar remains universally available, so it’s incredibly easy to move around the site.

Do you access Collaborate from a mobile? Share your tips in the comments!

Enterprise collaboration news: January 2014 round-up

The first month of 2014 has seen enterprise collaboration news full of suggestions for how organisations can work to improve their operations and make the most of their existing resources.

Leveraging organisations’ networks

Knowledge sharing and talent management have been big news this month, as enterprises look to make improvements and investments in the year ahead. In his article for Forbes, What should HR leaders focus on in 2014?, Edward Lawler explains that the main focus for most organisations this year should be on talent management and talent development, which Edward says is “becoming more critical as many organisations are doing much more complex, knowledge-based work and operating globally”. It’s essential that enterprises have the tools to do this, and knowledge management systems such as HighQ Collaborate will prove increasingly helpful.
As well as managing and leveraging the human network of organisations, it is also vital that employees are connected to one another and the organisation read more at http://highq.com/enterprise-collaboration-news-january-2014-round/

A simple guide to easy project management

Project managers, how do you currently schedule your project timelines? Most likely you create a spread sheet or Gantt chart with each of your milestones mapped out. These charts are extremely useful in apportioning time and resource to each element of a project, as well as being able to estimate completion dates for each element and the project as a whole.

However, they hold a vast amount of information that can be difficult for someone who isn’t deeply involved in project management to follow. These individual documents are often held in one place which isn’t easily accessible for everyone involved in the project or those on the outside, and when milestones inevitably changes, it is difficult to communicate the updated time schedule to everyone involved.

Instead of struggling to communicate a complex schedule to many people on your own, you can use your enterprise social collaboration platform’s Events module to do it for you.
But how exactly can you use the Events module to boost visibility and transparency of your project milestones and help you with project management? read more.